NASA discards reusable engines, Blue Origin and SpaceX push new frontiers

• On the Monday before Thanksgiving NASA made what it deemed a momentous announcement: the space agency had awarded $1.16 billion to Aerojet Rocketdyne for rocket engines that would power its “Journey to Mars.” By contrast, a few hours earlier, the private space company Blue Origin secretly launched a rocket into space and safely landed it. The contrast between the deal struck in corridors of Washington D.C. and what had happened in the desert of West Texas could not have been more stark.

• The engines that will power NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, were first developed in 1970. These RS-25 engines that gave the space shuttle its thrust were engineering marvels; with some refurbishment NASA could use them over and over again. But now NASA is funding a contract to restart production of those old engines because they would no longer be reused. Like the rest of the massive SLS rocket, its engines will be used once and then burn up in the atmosphere.

• In contrast to the billions of dollars NASA spends on legacy hardware, Blue Origin has received about $25 million from the agency during its 15-year existence. That’s less than the cost of a single RS-25 engine. With the launch of its New Shepard vehicle, Blue Origin has gone not only for reusable engines but a reusable booster and a reusable spacecraft. Why? Because this approach is much, much cheaper than throwing flight-quality hardware away after every launch.

• NASA, of course, has aimed for low-cost, reusable vehicles in the past. Just three months after the flight of Apollo 11, in 1969, NASA’s chief of manned spaceflight said as much. At NASA’s space shuttle symposium that year George Mueller set an ambitious goal for the vehicle: slash the cost of flying stuff to orbit all the way down to $25 a pound. Regular folks could buy tickets into space. “We can open up a whole new era of space exploration,” Mueller said at the meeting.

• But the shuttle, although a technical wonder and the world’s first reusable orbital spacecraft, did not come close to this lofty goal. Over the course of three decades and 135 flights, the shuttle’s costs were much closer to $25,000 a pound. The space shuttle had two accidents, first in 1986 and then in 2003. It also wasn’t as easy to reuse the vehicle as hoped. And with traditional NASA contracting processes, the shuttle proved very expensive to fly.

Keywords - Awarded $1.16 billion to Aerojet Rocketdyne for rocket engines,RS-25 engines that gave the space shuttle,world’s first reusable orbital spacecraft,shuttle proved very expensive.

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